Abstract
Japanese director Naomi Kawase (born 1969) is a celebrated filmmaker on the contemporary stage of World Cinema. Her best-known feature films since Suzaku (1997) have been screened and acclaimed widely, both on the film festival circuit, and (more intermittently) in art-house cinema seasons. These elaborately stylised yet strikingly personal narratives, shot on 35 millimetre film, have invited comparison with current masters such as Alexander Sokurov and Terrence Malick — especially in their exploration of sublime, spiritual themes and subjects, such as the constant return to motifs of birth and death.
My body … is not plunged in one unique and specified variety of space. It works in Euclidean space, but it only works there. It sees in a projective space; it touches, caresses and feels in a topological space; it suffers in another and hears and communicates in a third … This intersection, these junctions always need to be constructed. And in gene ral whoever is unsuccessful is considered sick. Her body explodes from the disconnection of spaces.
Michel Serres (1983, p. 44, translation amended)
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works cited
Barthes, Roland (1977) Image-music-text (London: Fontana).
Beaujour, Michel (1980) Miroirs d’encre (Paris: Seuil).
Bellour, Raymond (2002) L’Entre-images. Photo, cinéma, video (Paris: Éditions de la Différence).
——— (1988) Eye for I: Video Self-Portraits, catalogue, downloaded 3 January 2007 from http://www.korotonomedya.net/; no longer available.
Blake, Terence (1981) ‘On Matters Foreign’, Local Consumption, 1, 50–60.
Bonitzer, Pascal (1981) ‘Partial Vision: Film and the Labyrinth’, Wide Angle, 4.4, 56–63.
Bordwell, David (1987) Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge).
Connor, Steven (2004) ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, Anglistik, 15, 105–17, http://www.stevenconnor.com/topologies/, last accessed 29 December 2013.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota).
——— (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (London: Continuum).
Gerow, Aaron (2000) ‘Documentarists of Japan: Kawase Naomi’, Documentary Box, 16, http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/16/box16-1-1-e.html, last accessed 29 December 2013.
Henderson, Brian (1980) A Critique of Film Theory (New York: E. P. Dutton).
Krauss, Rosalind (1976) ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, October, 1, 51–64.
Martin, Adrian (2005) ‘Abrazando el aire/Embracing Air’, Tren de sombras, 5, no longer online.
Sánchez, Sergi (2013) Hacia una imagen no-tiempo. Deleuze y la cine contemporanéo (Asturias: Universidad de Oviedo).
Serres, Michel (1983) Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
——— (1995) Genesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).
Virilio, Paul (2002) ‘The Overexposed City’, in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds) The Blackwell City Reader (London: Blackwell), 440–8.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Adrian Martin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Martin, A. (2015). A Certain Dark Corner of Modern Cinema. In: Grant, S., McNeilly, J., Veerapen, M. (eds) Performance and Temporalisation. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410276_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410276_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48891-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-41027-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)